Information technology (IT) operations environments house a large number of applications required by the business for daily operation (e.g., security and authentication applications, messaging applications, backup and recovery applications, etc.). Monitoring these applications requires a multi-sourced and multi-tiered approach: (1) sampling and monitoring performance metrics such as CPU, memory, storage, etc.; (2) collecting and analyzing log data derived from each application; and (3) monitoring network traffic.
Each of these sources of information requires unique monitoring tools to collect, analyze, and store the relevant metrics and, in many cases, the monitoring tool is unique for each application (e.g., Exchange messaging systems might be monitored by a specific tool while the authentication and security environment might require a different tool). Moreover, even when monitoring the same source of information, such as performance metrics, each application and, at times, each server that is part of the application deployment, requires specific thresholds to be defined over each of the performance metrics that require monitoring.